Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (53 page)

Christian Democracy in Italy resembled in many respects similar parties in West Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium. It lacked ideological baggage. To be sure, De Gasperi and his successors took care to meet regularly with the Vatican authorities and never to propose or support any legislation of which the Vatican disapproved; post-war Italy was in some respects the Church’s moment of revenge for the aggressively anti-clerical secularism of the new Italian state after 1861. But the active role of the Catholic Church in Italian politics was smaller than both its defenders and its critics liked to assert. The main vehicle for social control was the powerful central ministries—it is significant that De Gasperi, like the Communist parties of eastern Europe in the immediate post-war years, took care to keep the Interior Ministry securely under CD direction.

In time, the clientelistic system of patronage and favors put in place by the Christian Democrats came to characterize national Italian politics as a whole. Other parties were constrained to follow suit: in cities and districts controlled by the PCI, most notably ‘Red’ Bologna and the surrounding Emilia region, the Communists supported
their
friends and favored
their
clients, the urban workers and rural smallholders of the lower Po valley. If there was a difference, it lay in the Communists’ emphasis upon the propriety and honesty of their municipal administration, in contrast with the widely acknowledged corruption and rumored Mafia links of the CD municipalities of the South. In the 1950s, large-scale corruption was a near-monopoly of Christian Democrats; in later decades the Socialists who governed the great cities of the North emulated them with considerable success. In politics, corruption is largely a by-product of opportunity.

Government Italian-style was not especially edifying, but it worked. Over time whole areas of public and civic activity were carved up
de facto
into political families. Entire industries were ‘colonised’ by the Christian Democrats. Control and employment at newspapers and radio—later television—were divided among Christian Democrats, Socialists and Communists; occasional allowance was made for the somewhat shrunken constituency of old-school anti-clerical liberals. Jobs and favors were created and delivered proportional to local, regional and national political clout. Every social organism from trade unions to sporting clubs was split among Christian Democrat, Socialist, Communist, Republican and Liberal variants. From the point of view of Economic Man the system was grossly wasteful, and inimical to private initiative and fiscal efficiency. The Italian ‘economic miracle’ (as we shall see) happened in spite of it rather than because of it.

And yet: Italy’s post-war stability was the crucial permissive condition for the country’s economic performance and subsequent social transformation. And that stability rested, paradoxical as it may appear, upon the rather peculiar institutional arrangements just described. The country lacked a stable majority in favor of any one party or program, and the complicated electoral system of proportional representation generated parliaments too divided to agree on substantial or controversial legislation: the post-war Republican constitution did not acquire a Constitutional Court to adjudicate its laws until 1956, and the much-discussed need for regional autonomy was not voted upon in Parliament until fourteen years later.

Accordingly, as in Fourth Republic France and for some of the same reasons, Italy was in practice run by un-elected administrators working in central government or one of the many para-state agencies. This distinctly un-democratic outcome has led historians to treat the Italian political system with some disdain. The opportunities for graft, bribery, corruption, political favoritism and plain robbery
were
extensive and they worked above all to the advantage of the virtual one-party monopoly of the Christian Democrats.
⁹¹
Yet under the umbrella of these arrangements, state and society in Italy proved remarkably resilient in the face of inherited challenges and new ones ahead. When measured by the standards of Canada or Denmark, Italy in the 1950s might appear wanting in public probity and institutional transparency. But by the standards of Italy’s strife-ridden national past, or by those prevailing in the other states of Mediterranean Europe with which the country was traditionally compared, Italy had taken a remarkable leap forward.

In important respects Italy’s condition after the war stood comparison with that of Austria. Both countries had fought alongside Germany and had suffered accordingly after the war (Italy paid a total of $360 million in reparations to the Soviet Union, Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania and Ethiopia). Like Italy, Austria was a poor and unstable country whose post-war renaissance could hardly have been predicted from her recent past. The country’s two dominant political groupings had spent the inter-war years in bitter conflict. Most Austrian Social Democrats had regarded the emergence in 1918 of a truncated Austrian state out of the ruins of the Habsburg Empire as an economic and political nonsense. In their view the German-speaking remnant of the old Dual Monarchy ought logically to have joined its fellow Germans in an
Anschluss
(union), and would have done so had the self-determination clauses of the Versailles agreements been applied consistently.

The Austrian Left had always received its strongest backing from working-class Vienna and the urban centers of eastern Austria. During the inter-war years of the First Austrian Republic, most of the rest of the country—rural, Alpine and deeply Catholic—voted for the Christian Socials, a provincial and conservative party suspicious of change and outsiders. Unlike the Social Democrats, the Christian Socials had no pan-German urge to be absorbed into an urban and mostly Protestant Germany. But nor did they have any sympathy for the Social Democratic policies of the Viennese workers’ movement; in 1934 a coup engineered by the Right destroyed the Social Democrats’ bastion in ‘Red Vienna’ and with it Austrian democracy. From 1934 until the Nazi invasion Austria was ruled by an authoritarian clericalist regime in which the Catholic party exercised a monopoly of power.

The legacy of Austria’s first, unhappy experience with democracy lay heavily on the post-war Republic. The Christian Socials, reborn as the Austrian People’s Party, boasted proudly of their opposition in 1938 to the German takeover; but they were conspicuously silent on their singular contribution to the destruction of Austrian democracy just four years earlier. The Socialists, as the Social Democrats were now known, could reasonably claim to have been the victims twice over: first of the civil war in 1934 and then at the hands of the Nazis. What this obscured, however, was their erstwhile enthusiasm for the
Anschluss
. Dr Karl Renner, the Socialist leader and first president of the independent Republic established by the Austrian State Treaty of 1955, had maintained his principled enthusiasm for a union of Austria and Germany as late as 1938.

Both parties thus had an interest in putting the past behind them—we have seen what became of initial attempts at de-Nazification in post-war Austria. The Socialists were the majority party in Vienna (which comprised one-quarter of the country’s population), while the People’s Party had a lock on the allegiance of voters in the countryside and small towns of the Alpine valleys. In political terms the country was divided almost exactly in half: in the elections of 1949 the People’s Party outpolled the Socialists by just 123,000 votes; in 1953 the Socialists led by 37,000; in 1956 the People’s Party again won, by 126,000 votes; in 1959 the result favored the Socialists, by 25,000 votes; and in 1962 it was reversed yet again, with the Peoples Party winning by a mere 64,000 votes in a total of over four and a quarter million.

These uniquely narrow margins recalled the similarly close elections of the inter-war Republic. Catholic Austria and Socialist Austria thus faced the renewed prospect of parliamentary politics degenerating into a cultural civil war. Even with the help of a third party—the Liberals, who depended to an embarrassing extent on the vote of ex-Nazis, and whose vote in any case fell steadily at each election—neither Austrian party could hope to form a stable government, and any controversial legislation would risk resurrecting bitter memories. The prognosis for Austrian democracy was not promising.

Yet Austria not only succeeded in avoiding a re-run of its history, but managed in a short space of time to repackage itself as a model Alpine democracy: neutral, prosperous and stable. In part this was due to the uncomfortable proximity of the Red Army, occupying Lower Austria until 1955 and thence withdrawn just a few kilometers to the east—a reminder that Austria’s neighbors now included three Communist states (Yugoslavia, Hungary and Czechoslovakia) and that the country’s vulnerable location made it prudent to pursue conciliatory and uncontentious policies at home and abroad. In addition, the Cold War assigned Austria an identity by association—as Western, free, democratic—that it might have been hard put to generate from within.

But the main source of Austria’s successful post-war political settlement lay in the widely acknowledged need to avoid ideological confrontations of the sort that had torn the country apart before the war. Since Austria had to be—there could be no question after 1945 of annexing it to its German neighbor—its political communities would have to find a way to co-exist. The solution on which the country’s leaders settled was to eliminate the very possibility of confrontation by running the country in permanent tandem. In politics, the two major parties agreed to collaborate in office: from 1947 to 1966 Austria was governed by a ‘Grand Coalition’ of Socialists and People’s Party. Ministries were carefully divided up, with the People’s Party typically providing the Prime Minister, the Socialists the Foreign Minister and so on.

In public administration—which in post-war Austria comprised all public services, most of the media and much of the economy, from banking to logging—a similar division of responsibilities was reached, known as
Proporz
. At almost every level jobs were filled, by agreement, with candidates proposed by one of the two dominant parties. Over time this system of ‘jobs for the boys’ reached deep into Austrian life, forming a chain of interlocking patrons and clients who settled virtually every argument either by negotiation or else through the exchange of favors and appointments. Labor disputes were handled by arbitration rather than confrontation, as the bi-cephalous state sought to head off dissent by incorporating contending parties into its shared system of benefits and rewards. The unprecedented prosperity of these years allowed the Grand Coalition to paper over disagreements or conflicts of interest and, in effect, purchase the consensus on which the country’s equilibrium rested.

Some groups in Austrian society were inevitably left out—small shopkeepers, independent artisans, isolated farmers, anyone whose work or awkward opinions placed them outside the grid of allocated benefits and positions. And in districts where one or other side had an overwhelming advantage, proportionality would sometimes be ignored in favor of a monopoly of posts and favors for members of that party. But the pressure to avoid confrontation usually triumphed over local self-interest. Just as Austria’s newfound neutrality was enthusiastically adopted as the country’s identity tag, displacing awkward memories of more contentious identities from the past—‘Habsburg’, ‘German’, ‘Socialist’, ‘Christian’—so the post-ideological (indeed post-political) implications of government-by-coalition and administration-by-
Proporz
came to define Austrian public life.

At first sight this would seem to distinguish the Austrian solution to political instability from the Italian variant; after all, the major political cleavage in Italy separated Communists from Catholics, a juxtaposition that hardly suggests the description ‘post-ideological’.
⁹²
But in fact the two cases were quite similar. The singular quality of Togliatti and his party was the importance they attached, throughout the post-war decades, to political stability: to the preservation and strengthening of the institutions of democratic public life, even at a cost to the Communists’ own credibility as the revolutionary vanguard. And Italy, too, was administered through a system of favors and jobs that bore a certain resemblance to
Proporz
, albeit skewed heavily to the advantage of one side.

If Italy paid a price for political stability in an ultimately intolerable level of public corruption, the cost to Austrians was less tangible but just as pernicious. A Western diplomat once described post-war Austria as ‘an opera sung by the understudies’, and the point is well taken. As a result of the First World War Vienna lost its raison d’être as an imperial capital; in the course of Nazi occupation and the Second World War the city lost its Jews, a significant proportion of its most educated and cosmopolitan citizens.
⁹³
Once the Russians left in 1955, Vienna lacked even the
louche
appeal of divided Berlin. Indeed, the measure of Austria’s remarkable success in overcoming its troubled past was that to many visitors its most distinctive feature was its reassuringly humdrum quality.

Behind the tranquil appeal of an increasingly prosperous ‘Alpine Republic’, however, Austria too was corrupt in its own way. Like Italy, it won its newfound security at the price of a measure of national forgetting. But whereas most other European countries—Italy especially—could boast at least a myth of national resistance to the occupying Germans, Austrians could not plausibly put their wartime experience to any such service. And unlike the West Germans, they had not been constrained to acknowledge, at least in public, the crimes they had committed or allowed. In a curious way Austria resembled
East
Germany, and not only in the rather monotonously bureaucratic quality of its civic facilities. Both countries were arbitrary geographical expressions whose post-war public life rested on a tacit agreement to fabricate for common consumption a flattering new identity—except that the exercise proved considerably more successful in the Austrian case.